We spent this morning driving around the beautiful Marlborough Sounds. Most of the walk that I mentioned yesterday, which goes the entire length of the coastline, can only be reached by foot or water as there are no roads that go through the mountain range, however we decided to see how far into the mountains we could get and set out in the campervan at about 7:30am. Even though we were both pretty tired we were really glad that we had come out so early as the scenery looked amazing in the early morning light. We headed up into the mountains in search of a place called Te Mahia, which is one of the main stop-over points on the walk before it winds its way up into the tops of the mountains. On the way we managed to get lost and found ourselves at a little beach called Mistletoe Bay. The bay was down a very steep and gravely mountain and Tom had a real job on his hands to get the camper down the side. Once we got to the bottom we found a lovely little bay but we were pretty disappointed to find out that this beach had been bought by a campsite and was only open to people paying to stay on the site

. Afterwards we headed back to the main road (I use that term very loosely, it was more of a dirt track!) and found our way to Te Mahia. When we got there we went and sat on the jetty for a while and had some breakfast to set us up for the rest of the day. Once we had finished our early morning exploration of the Sounds we set off for our next destination of Nelson. Only about an hour away, Nelson is considered the best place to live in New Zealand, so we were expecting big things! On the way I had my first drive of the campervan! It was just my luck that the nice long straight road I choose to drive on very quickly turned into a steep winding climb up a mountain and once I got us over the top I hopped back into the passenger seat, quite happy to let Tom do the rest of the driving!

Once in Nelson, we realised why it is so highly praised, it is lovely here! It gets most sunshine in the whole of New Zeland, it has lots of nice little shops and cafes, it is right on the beach and it also has fantastic views of the huge snow-capped mountains in the distance! We were quite happy spending the rest of the day wandering around the highstreet and eating great ice-creams from a little place that sold really unusual flavours- Tom had Roasted Pumpkin Seed and Honey and I had Black Cherry and Crushed Almonds. They had just sold out of Salmon and Dill flavoured ice-cream before we got there! As we were sitting outside eating them a little old lady walked past us and joked that she was going to mug us for our ice-creams... but don't worry we did some nifty kung-fo moves on her and she won't be stealing anyone elses ice-cream anytime soon! :)